I’ve been thinking about the loss of my mother a lot lately. She died in August, so no wonder. This time of year, her absence is particularly palpable.
She’s been gone 33 years and I’ve never gotten over her death. I don’t feel at peace about it. I feel a missing part, a vacuum where she should be. I rail at the universe for a life without her. I’m not okay with the fact that she had to leave me when I needed her most and when she most wanted to be here with me. In the last 33 years, I’ve adjusted to carrying around this loss. Mother’s Days continue to hurt with an intensity that surprises me every year. But I’ve carried this with me for so long that I no longer know what it’s like to not feel it. But no one should grow up without their mother.
It’s been 3 years since Dave died so of course I’m in no way at peace with his death. I’m not over it. I can see that I never will be and I never will be at peace with his loss. I’m not okay with him being sick and scared and dying without my presence in the room. I’m not okay with our being ripped apart long before we should’ve been. I will just learn to continue to incorporate it into my new life and live side by side with it. I will continue to learn to live with a missing piece. A person I’m still linked to but cannot be with.
No matter what happens to me now, I continue to miss out on life without my mother. And I continue to miss out on life with Dave, even though I’m living a beautiful, full life without him now, too.
I have driven by the house Dave and I lived in together exactly 2 times. This last time was just a few weeks ago. I looked at that place that was home for us for over a decade and had the strangest sensation. It was this hallucination that I was somehow in two parallel universes at the same time. I was in this life, without Dave in it, and I was also back in that old life. It’s very much like the feeling I get when I see a mother and daughter together, especially a grown daughter. I feel as though I’m in my life, watching what cannot be while somewhere, somehow, my mother and I are together again, me as a grown woman and her in her 60s.
Two lives. The one that could’ve been and the one that is. This life without them should be really lived in order to make up for their loss.
I don’t believe their loss should completely define me or that it will restrict me from living fully now, but I will not agree with someone who claims I should be at peace with it.
Both losses have shaped me and will continue to. And that is okay. Why wouldn’t they? They are my intimate companions whether I like it or not. I can and will continue to work on integrating them, but I won’t be at peace with them.
I don’t think I have to in order to heal and live.